ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses issues of method in the psychoanalytic interpretation of literature and art, primarily from the perspective of the British object-relations tradition, recognizing in the first instance the enormous presence and influence of psychoanalysis in many fields of culture. 1 Some genres of fine art, such as surrealism, have been explicit in their interest and borrowings from psychoanalysis. Many eminent literary and art critics have absorbed psychoanalytic thinking into their work. William Empson (1935), Lionel Trilling (1951), Adrian Stokes (Sayers, 2015; Stokes & Williams, 2014), Harold Bloom (1973), Stanley Cavell (1987) and the philosopher Richard Wollheim (1993b) are among them. An influential approach to film studies (Metz, 1974) has been influenced by the psychoanalytic ideas of Lacan, but film has also been studied from an object-relations perspective (Sabbadini, 2003, 2014). Freud himself and many successor psychoanalysts have written insightfully about literature and art—for example, Ernest Jones (1949), Ella Freeman Sharpe (1950), Hanna Segal (1952), Ronald Britton (1998a), John Steiner (1993a), Ignes Sodré (2014), Gregorio Kohon (2014), Meg Harris Williams and Margot Waddell (1991) and Thomas Ogden (Ogden & Ogden, 2013). Freud believed that great writers such as Sophocles and Shakespeare, to whom his writings make many references, anticipated the discoveries of psychoanalysis, and that psychoanalysts needed to learn from their work.
